RRND Email Full Text (Scheduled)


  • Murder for Christmas?

    Source: Antiwar.com
    by Andrew P Napolitano

    “When Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth posted a meme of Franklin the Turtle, the amiable child’s cartoon character, in a helicopter using a military weapon to kill people in a small boat below him, and captioned it ‘For your Christmas wish list,’ it understandably caused an uproar. Should the secretary of defense be mocking the people his troops have killed? Should he engage a child’s cartoon character to produce this mockery? Should anyone in his right mind, who professes to understand Christianity, suggest that this killing should be on a child’s Christmas wish list? Should he be killing nonviolent boatpeople? Here is the back story.” (12/05/25)

    https://original.antiwar.com/andrew-p-napolitano/2025/12/04/murder-for-christmas

  • Venezuela: Eye on the Prize?

    Source: Garrison Center
    by Thomas L Knapp

    “President Donald Trump embarked on a serial murder spree around the Caribbean in September, ordering boats (and people) blown up by US military forces on the pretense that he’s fighting a ‘narco-terrorist cartel’ headed by Maduro (on whose head he’s placed a $50 million bounty). He’s also steadily increased the US military presence in the region, rattling the American saber for ‘regime change’ in Caracas. It’s been tempting, so far, to write Trump’s belligerence off as an attempt to distract from his domestic political failures …. On the other hand, if he’s really going to take the US to war with Venezuela, what better moment — for theatrical and propaganda purposes — to launch a full-scale attack than just as his quisling of choice accepts a ‘peace prize’ in Oslo?” (12/06/25)

    https://thegarrisoncenter.org/archives/20193

  • Our Killing Machines

    Source: Pierre Lemieux
    by Pierre Lemieux

    “In 2019, the President of the United States, Donald Trump, famously wrote: ‘We train our boys to be killing machines, then prosecute them when they kill!’ The ‘boys’ are US soldiers, but who is we and which possessor does our refer to? … The fundamental problem with collectives is this: hidden under any collective are different and distinct individuals. Without starting from this elemental fact, one cannot understand the behavior of the collectives and sub-collectives that can be drawn around individuals. One cannot understand the social consequences of individual actions.” (12/06/25)

    https://pierrelemieux.substack.com/p/our-killing-machines

  • Europe Fires a Speech Warning

    Source: Racket News
    by Matt Taibbi

    “The Digital Services Act, the European Commission’s content control law developed across multiple stages dating to the mid-2010s, has finally become fully operational, in Star Wars parlance. Officials announced a long-threatened €120 million (about $140 million) fine of Elon Musk’s X platform, with the major offenses being the use of a ‘deceptive’ check mark program and failure to ‘provide researchers with access to the platform’s public data.’ The fine comes at a strange time. A few weeks ago, the EC began a public campaign of walking back its biggest censorship initiatives, thanks to a growing belief that its stifling regulatory environment was costing Old-World companies a chance to compete for investment in AI technology.” (12/05/25)

    https://www.racket.news/p/europe-fires-a-speech-warning

  • The last act of the feature film

    Source: Washington Post
    by Megan McArdle

    “The short story used to be a viable commercial and artistic proposition, until television killed off the pulp magazines. By the 1980s, short stories were more of a loss leader for novel writers (actual or aspiring). Today, the form is mostly the province of tiny literary magazines, and its author usually survives on grants, gigs teaching creative writing and pedestrian day jobs. I’m afraid I expect the feature film to suffer a similar fate, because everything about the medium is optimized for theaters: its visual language, its lavish production budgets and even its length (long enough to be worth leaving the house for, not so long that your butt goes numb). In the future, storytelling will be optimized for streaming into our living rooms — unless, of course, it’s optimized for YouTube and TikTok, or some other technological medium I can’t yet imagine.” (12/06/25)

    https://archive.is/faLgV

  • America needs to restore high standards before our schools become completely worthless

    Source: New York Post
    by staff

    “America’s kids are paying a steep price for lower standards and less testing in schools — and there’s no obvious sign of a turnaround. It’s particularly troubling for New York kids, especially as state ‘leaders’ have decided to stop requiring passing scores on Regents exams to graduate high school starting in the 2027-’28 school year. How crucial are hard standards? Well, after colleges (in the benighted name of ‘equity’) stopped requiring SAT or ACT scores as part of the admissions process a few years back, a host of high schools evidently stopped teaching the skills needed to do well on such tests — even though such skills are vital to getting through college, and life. Kids who are unprepared don’t face consequences until it’s too late — i.e., when they’re already in college and struggling to do the work expected of them.” (12/06/25)

    https://nypost.com/2025/12/06/opinion/alarming-signs-kids-are-paying-a-steep-price-for-low-standards-and-less-testing-in-schools/

  • NATO ambassador: Don’t hate on the sausage before its made

    Source: Responsible Statecraft
    by Kelley Beaucar Vlahos

    “Europeans at the Doha Forum in Qatar were quite clear in their disdain for President Donald Trump’s National Security Strategy and his peace plan for Ukraine, but his ambassador to NATO Matthew Whitaker came out swinging in favor of both, unabashedly telling an audience Saturday that U.S. partners need to step up if they want continued support from Washington and not to criticize the sausage (peace deal) while it’s being made.” (12/06/25)

    https://responsiblestatecraft.org/us-nato-trump/

  • Trump Bites the Hand That Voted for Him

    Source: The Bulwark
    by Will Saletan

    “Donald Trump’s latest assault on immigrants — threatening to ‘denaturalize’ U.S. citizens who were born in other countries — is an affront to human rights and American values. It’s also a betrayal of the six million naturalized Americans who voted for him last year. Without their ballots, he wouldn’t be president. And if they turn against him, his party will be out of power. … if Trump thinks he can strip naturalized Americans of their citizenship, he’d better move fast. The backlash from nonwhite voters has already cost his party two governorships.” (12/05/25)

    https://www.thebulwark.com/p/trump-bites-the-hand-that-voted-for-him-naturalized-immigrants-citizens

  • In Haiti, soccer joy and longed-for unity

    Source: Christian Science Monitor
    by staff

    “It’s been nearly 10 years since the people of Haiti have voted in an election – and more than 50 since this soccer-loving nation has fielded a team in the World Cup tournament. In 2026, they’ll get to do both. On Dec. 5, a few weeks after Haiti’s November qualifying victory, World Cup organizer FIFA announced group draws for the competition. Around the same time, with somewhat less fanfare, Haiti’s transitional government announced election plans. Meanwhile, the United States called on countries to support a new United Nations-approved multinational mission to quell rampant gang violence in the Caribbean island nation. Neither the World Cup berth nor the proposed international Gang Suppression Force promise easy wins for Haitians. But they hint at a possibility of parlaying the unity and persistent effort demonstrated on the soccer pitch to the arena of politics and governance.” (12/05/25)

    https://www.csmonitor.com/Commentary/the-monitors-view/2025/1205/In-Haiti-soccer-joy-and-longed-for-unity

  • Strategy and Culture in the Graveyard of Empires

    Source: Law & Liberty
    by Jason Gehrke

    “About two weeks after America’s final withdrawal from Kabul, Al-Qaeda issued an open letter praising ‘the Almighty, the Omnipotent,’ the one who ‘broke America’s back’ in Afghanistan ‘the graveyard of empires.’ Al-Qaeda’s boast transformed a self-fulfilling prophecy into the Taliban’s triumphant honorific, according to Choosing Defeat, a new book by Paul D. Miller, Professor of the Practice of International Affairs at Georgetown University. … In his telling, the phrase ‘graveyard of empires’ haunted U.S. policymaking for twenty years. Every wartime president invoked it, as did American generals, senior civilians, defense intellectuals, and journalists. There’s only one problem: Afghanistan never was known as the graveyard of empires — not until Milt Bearden penned an article in 2001. When asked, Bearden said he ‘just came up with the name for [his] piece for Foreign Affairs.'” (12/05/25)

    https://lawliberty.org/book-review/strategy-and-culture-in-the-graveyard-of-empires/

  • Trump’s aggression toward Venezuela a warning to Putin

    Source: Fox News
    by David Marcus

    “President Donald Trump has seen recent setbacks in his polling numbers on many issues, but one bright spot in surveys has been his aggressive approach to Venezuela, including taking out drug cartel boats. But there is another purpose at work here, one that may help to end the war in Ukraine. What is important to understand is that Venezuela is a client state of Russia, as is Iran, and as was Syria until the recent overthrow of Bashar al-Assad. One by one, Trump has been proving that against American might, Putin cannot keep his sketchy global friends safe.” (12/06/25)

    https://www.foxnews.com/opinion/david-marcus-trumps-aggression-toward-venezuela-warning-putin

  • “The Worst of the Worst”

    Source: The Dispatch
    by Kevin D Williamson

    “[T]he Trump administration has its agents arresting green card applicants as they show up for their final meeting. These are not ‘the worst of the worst’ as Donald Trump likes to put it: One was a British mother with her 4-month-old baby in her arms. (The New York Times has the whole ugly story.) These people were not accused of having entered the country illegally or of violating U.S. immigration law in some way other than following a legal process that takes a long time and creates ambiguities. Some of them were shipped off to detention centers. Why are federal agents arresting these people? Because they are the easiest people to arrest …. Some strategy: Abuse the weak, the vulnerable, and the law-abiding — chasing down the actual malefactors is too much work.” (12/05/25)

    https://thedispatch.com/article/immigration-criminals-green-card-arrests-trump/

  • Sudan, Venezuela, And Other Notes

    Source: Caitlin Johnstone, Rogue Journalist
    by Caitlin Johnstone

    “The Guardian has a report out which says that at least 60,000 people were murdered by Sudan’s Rapid Support Forces (RSF) when they captured El Fasher in October, which would be the largest single massacre since Rwanda in 1994. Just in the last few days the RSF have reportedly killed 46 children and scores of adults in suicide drone attacks. These massacres are made possible by the United Arab Emirates, who have been funneling weapons to the RSF through a complex international supply chain. Much like the Saudi-led genocide in Yemen from 2015 to 2022 (which the UAE also participated in), this is yet another instance of a tyrannical Gulf state monarchy committing unfathomable atrocities while its friends in Washington look the other way.” (12/07/25)

    https://caitlinjohnstone.com.au/2025/12/07/sudan-venezuela-and-other-notes/